In order for a business to truly succeed and experience growth, you need your entire team to be working together with you.
If your managers, employees and your business as a whole is going to improve, you need the input from your team to identify what is working and what isn’t working. This means that you need to remove any fear or stigma that exists in your company culture around feedback.
The institute of employment studies did a review of employee engagement and found that one of the critical drivers of engagement was a manager who listens, develops, uses open communication, makes time, respects individuals, encourages, is fair and provides feedback.
They said that “development needs to be encouraged by managers and the organisation, and continuous feedback mechanisms should be in place to tackle development needs as they arise. Employees who are engaged feel empowered, are confident in achieving in their role and have opportunities to perform at their best.”
So how do you go about getting feedback?
The institute of employment studies said that “employees may engage in an organisation if they can understand the organisation’s values and goals, and developments in these. They need to understand how their own role contributes to these, and the resources available to deliver them, as well as feeling well‐informed about what is happening in the organisation. Only through having formal and open two‐ way communication between managers and staff, such as having opportunities for upwards feedback without fear of repercussions, can employees access this information.”
It makes sense. Who enjoys feeling like their opinions don’t count?
So the key things to consider are what to ask and how to ask them. Some good management training or coaching can be the right way forward in some cases.
Here are my top tips on how to ask the questions. Next week I will share what questions to ask, so be sure to be on the lookout for that!
- Make them count – Think about the questions logically. Are they going to give you valuable information that will benefit yourself and your employee? Keep in mind that the point of asking the questions is to help drive growth and improvement.
- Don’t get defensive – One of the reasons that feedback is so scary is because what you get isn’t always easy or what you want to hear. How you react to feedback will affect the confidence of your employee when speaking up in the future. Communicating effectively is all about conflict resolution, which involves listening, taking what has been said on board and reacting in a way that will ultimately create a positive result.
- Follow up – You won’t find out if things are improving if you don’t follow up with your employees. Sometimes that might be as easy as asking them the same questions on a monthly basis to get a feel for how things are changing. Either way, this will work to your benefit as the employees will start to think about these questions in their own time as well and it will be obvious that you genuinely care about what they are telling you.
- Ask the right way – How you phrase questions can have a massive impact on the reactions that you get. If you ask open-ended questions or closed questions for example. Asking them what they think or how they feel about something before you explain your own thoughts will make them feel more at ease, to be honest with you rather than try to please you.